Management Team
TJ Sassani, Founder & CEO
TJ is the Founder & CEO of ekoVenture. He also founded the Bay Area Start-up Executive Network (BaseNet), a networking forum for technology executives, and co-founded the CEO Council, a working group for start-up technology entrepreneurs.
While his passion is and has always been adventure, TJ's diverse background includes more than a decade of experience in entrepreneurship, marketing, sales and web-based technology. Prior to founding ekoVenture, TJ held a Director role at Lux Research, an emerging technology research and advisory firm where he worked as part of the founding team to grow the business to profitability and 30 employees.
Prior to Lux Research, he spent five years at an ASP software firm where he held a variety of positions ranging from direct sales, marketing and product implementation. The remainder of his experience is split between operations, management, and client support roles working exclusively with large global 1000 organizations at the VP, CTO, and CEO levels.
TJ earned his dual bachelors degree in business management and business marketing with a minor in speech communications from Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania - where he attended on an academic/athletic scholarship.
On a personal front, TJ is an avid adventurer having pursued his passion in over 30 countries running the gamut from wreck diving in Australia to backcountry skiing in remote parts of western Canada. He is an IronMan triathlete and also recently completed a solo cycle from Portugal to Italy to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation and their tireless efforts in the battle against cancer.
Timothy Jones, VP of Technology
Tim brings nearly 20 years of experience at both high-tech startup companies and established industry leaders to ekoVenture, serving in a progression of engineering and management positions. Most recently, he was Director of Engineering for PlanetOut where he led a team of 25 engineers supporting a social networking site which received 100 million page views per month. Prior to PlanetOut, he led technical teams at Align Technology, Box Hill Systems, CrossWeave, Sendmail, Sun Microsystems, and VitalLink Business Systems.
Tim is an expert in the successful application of cutting edge web technologies and is a frequent speaker on such topics as Ruby on Rails and Amazon Web Services. He is an active participant in international technical standards efforts, and was a founding member of the W3C Web Services Architecture working group and the OASIS Web Services for Interactive Applications and Web Services for Remote Portals technical committees.
Tim received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Columbia University, affiliated with more Nobel prize winners than any other institution in the world, and the Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania, birthplace of ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic computer.
Ryan Morris, Content Manager
As ekoVenture's Content Manager Ryan directly manages a team of nine content acquisition associates. Prior to ekoVenture, Ryan spent time in business development, management and client services, most recently at VR Golden, a San Francisco based M&A group.
Prior to his professional experience, Ryan spent the better part of a decade traveling the world to over 40 countries on six continents. During this time, he developed a distinct perspective on the world of adventure travel with dozens of unique experiences, including sailing through a hurricane in Panama and surviving malaria in Mozambique.
Ryan also spent several years as a volunteer working with children in various regions. He taught at a youth tennis camp in Buenos Aires and started a youth-based volunteer soccer-coaching program for travelers in the small fishing village of Taganga, along the northern shores of Colombia.
Ryan graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder with a degree in Film Theory and achieved a state level ranking as a junior tennis player.